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Comment by malka | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not the rules themselves.

The rules applies to Spotify, but not to Apple music. Apple should make Apple music a separate entity, and make it pay 30%.

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No company should have the power to tell another company that they must split up into separate entities.

Company? No. But a government can absolutely do this and it's a thing that happens all the time, even in the US.

No company, but the government should be able to

Apple has built itself up into a vertical monopoly, which used to be illegal. There is no good reason to allow anti-competitive behaviours. They shouldn't be allowed to host the platform and compete with applications at the same time.

And yet vertical integration is a big part of why Apple products are so loved. By denying the option of vertical integration, you’re forcing the totality of products we use to be incrementally a little bit more crap.

you can have vertical integration. But having an advantage at one layer should no be leveraged as advantage to another layer.

Apple is free to make a music player. But its music player should abide by the same rules as other players in the market.

Either Apple Music has its income cut by 30%, or no one does.

Personally I’d have no problem if Apple was forced to give all streaming music services like Spotify a sweetheart (below cost) percentage, say 5%, which wouldn’t cover the totality of merchant fees, gift voucher markups, and dealing with fraud.

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